Running Chromium m60 on R-Car M3 board & AGL/Wayland.

It has been some time ago since my fellow igalian Frédéric Wang wrote a blog post about running Chromium with Wayland on Renesas R-Car M3 board. Since that time, we have made a great success with adding support of Wayland to Chromium with Ozone that aligns with Google plans. The blog post about these achievements can by found at my fellow igalian Antonio Gomes blog.

Perfomed by …

… and sponsored by …

Since the last build, the Automotive Grade Linux distribution, which is used to power the R-Car M3 board, has had some updates – CC branch was released and the next release had had many changes like update from Weston 1.09 to 1.11 and update binutils from 2.26 to 2.27. The binutils brought up some problems with linking, which was reported to AGL (the issue can be tracked here).

Due to the above mentioned linking problems, we decided to use CC branch to run tests with the latest Chromium/Ozone with Wayland and present our work during Automotive Linux Summit in Japan, Tokyo, where my fellow igalian Antonio Gomes gave a talk and presented the demo. The demo run smoothly and flawlessly. Afterwards, we rerun the tests, which were run previously in December, and compared the results. The outcome was very good as the overall perfomance of the browser increased.

But we still wanted to try the browser with the latest AGL branch and spent some time to resolve the issue, which was relocation overflow in R_AARCH64_LD64_GOTPAGE_LO15 and in R_AARCH64_ABS32 relocations. The specs for those relocations can be found from ELF for the ARM® 64-bit Architecture (AArch64) document.

In order to overcome the problem and fit into the overflow check, which can be found from the above mentioned document, we used -Os and -fPIE flags, which, in overall, optimized the final binary for space and reduced the size of the image, but lead to some perfomance decrease. After the image was ready, we run the R-Car M3 board and successfully started to browser using the following command line command –

The recipe for our meta-browser can be found from Igalia’s meta-browser github repository. It is also possible to test Chromium/Ozone with Wayland and X11 support by cloning and building our another chromium repository, but please note that the work is still in progress and some issues may occur.